Meyer: $6m Real Money Again

There are two ways to view the smaller sales of art this Spring. One is the all-too-common perception that smaller sales mean the art market has collapsed. Another is to see that there could be a healthy market a much lower level. Sotheby’s Tobias Meyer made this point to Agence France Presse:

“Six million dollars is again a substantial amount of money,” said Tobias Meyer, deputy chairman and head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s. “The art market has existed since the Greeks were fighting for then contemporary sculptures,” Meyer told AFP. “Whenever there is wealth, people want to buy art.”

And Meyer continued to hew to the important theme of a globalizing art market, which may be especially apt as financial indices recover quickly in emerging markets these few weeks:

He highlighted that recent Sotheby’s sales in Qatar had gone well. “We just had Turkish contemporary art sales in London and they went well,” Meyer continued. “With the future stabilizing again, China, Russia and the Middle East, all these new buying communities that were not there 20 years ago will come back in the long term, in the next two to three years.”